At present, the diagnosis of diseases for various body parts is done by Computer Tomography (CT) technologies. Taking lumbar disc as an example, diagnostic images of individual lumbar discs may typically be acquired by first scanning the entire lumbar to acquire a scout image as shown in FIG. 1 before a single lumbar disc is scanned axially, determining and adjusting scanning parameters, such as scanning position, scanning angle, scanning range and display field of view, etc., during the lateral scan, based on the scout image, and scanning axially based on the adjusted scanning parameters. For example, adjusting respectively the position, width and angle, etc. of each of five rectangle portions shown in FIG. 1 may respectively determine different scanning positions, scanning angles and scanning ranges for these five lumbar discs.
However, in the state of the art, scanning parameters are required to be adjusted manually, which has the following problems:
Firstly, upon manual adjustment of the above-mentioned scanning parameters, the accuracy that will be achieved by different operators may be different, inexperienced operation will cause relatively low accuracy of scanning parameters, thereby influence the precision of diagnostic results.
Secondly, although some experienced operators may accurately adjust scanning parameters, the time required for the adjustment is longer, as known from clinical experiments, for each lumbar disc, an operator will operate (e.g., click, drag, and the like) the mouse at least 5-6 times, and thus, for 5 lumbar discs, up to 25-30 times, in order to complete the parameter adjustment, leading to a troublesome operation and longer time for the operation, for a less experienced operator, the time required for the operation is much longer, thus reducing the efficiency of operation.
Therefore, there is a need for a new medical scanning system and method that can automatically determine scanning parameters based on a scout image, thereby reducing the time required for adjusting scanning parameters, and improving the precision.